"Come in," Beorn said.

The door opened.

Leof stepped into the office and stopped near the middle of the room instead of approaching the desk. Her eyes went to Beorn, then Aestrith, then back to Beorn, as though checking who the conversation belonged to.

"You asked for me?"

"Yes. Please sit down."

She crossed to the chair opposite the desk and perched at the edge of it, feet together, shoulders drawn in. It was the posture of someone trying to take up less space than she thought she was allowed.

Since hearing about the agricultural zone, the foundry, and the drainage work, she had expected this summons. Waiting had given her time to prepare answers, but it had not made the waiting easier.

Beorn studied her a moment, weighing where to begin.

"How are you finding the citadel?"

Leof considered the question in her way. She had an answer before he finished speaking, but checked it before letting it out.

"The food is better than anything before," she nodded. "The room is bigger than I’m used to."

Then, anticipating the next topic before he reached it.

"I know I don’t have a job. Like the others."

She offered it without complaint. Just a fact she believed belonged in the discussion.

"That’s what I called you for," Beorn replied.

She waited.

Beorn set down his quill and folded his hands over the ledger. "Of everyone in the department, your ability is the one I understand least. I can explain what Mod does with air pressure. I can explain what Hild does with stone. Yours doesn’t behave like theirs."

He held her gaze while he spoke, making sure she understood the distinction.

"That isn’t criticism, just me lacking enough knowledge."

Leof went stiff.

She had been carrying a question beneath her other questions, testing versions of it without speaking them aloud.

"Does that mean I can’t help with anything?"

The uncertainty was stifling enough she had to voice it out.

Aestrith replied before Beorn could.

"It means he doesn’t know yet."

She did not look directly at Leof while she spoke.

Leof turned the distinction over in her mind, testing whether it fit.

It did.

She looked back at Beorn.

He reached across the desk and picked up the ceramic inkwell. Functional, dark, half-full, its rim stained by years of use. He set it between them, closer to her side.

"Age it," he said. "Nothing big, only enough that we can observe the change."

Leof looked at the inkwell, considering the task.

"All right."

She focused.

The process resembled what she had done in the courtyard before, but slower than growth and narrower than what had happened to the vine.

Precision was important here, and she had been training that precision ever since. The sessions with Aestrith had not been about learning to do more, but about learning to stop before the power followed its own course.

The ink changed first at the rim.

The surface darkening as its chemistry moved beyond its earlier state.

Where ink met ceramic, it thickened. A dry crust formed, the skin old ink developed after days left uncapped. Inside the inkwell, the consistency shifted away from fluid. It thickened toward something between liquid and gel. The surface lost its reflective sheen and turned matte.

Thirty seconds. Slightly less.

"That’s enough," Beorn stopped her.

He examined the inkwell, thinking through the result.

"Can you reverse it?"

"I’ve tried before," Leof tilted her head. "With other things. It doesn’t go back."

"Try here anyway."

She did.

The crust at the rim spread inward instead, consuming more of the surface. The remaining fluid thickened past gel, past the point she had been trying to keep. The process did not stop where she wanted it to stop, but continued toward something brittle, dry, and dark, no longer meaningfully liquid.

After another thirty seconds, the inkwell contained something that could have been mistaken for ash by someone who had not watched the change happen.

Leof blinked.

"I can’t stop it."

An observation rather than an apology. Beorn appreciated how her behavior matched what she knew of her domain. She was giving him the rule.

He wrote in the ledger. First her statement. Then observations of the inkwell.

Then he looked at Leof.

Then at Aestrith.

An idea had started to form in his mind. He had been working through it since the previous conversation with Aestrith.

Aestrith seemed to sense his gaze, as she turned to stare back at him.

Beorn started to voice out his plan, "If Leof’s power is like you told me, entering through an unknown boundary from an unknown source."

Aestrith frowned slightly.

He continued without a change on his tone, "There’s a chance it is related to the incident in Coss’s mansion, the fracture that was created during the stalemate between you and the other Sinbound. That boundary event was born from the interaction between your field and her power."

"I remember."

Beorn flattened his hands against the desk, committing himself to the proposal.

"And that event let me see through the boundary."

Unknown to him, a hunger for knowledge flashed on his eyes. "I want to replicate it. Obviously not to cause another of those entities surge, but enough to see if it is possible to bridge this dimension to theirs. If you let your field grind against Leof’s domain, we might be able to do it."

There was a subtle excitement on his voice as he looked at Aestrith.

"A reconstruction of what happened in the mansion. I want to observe the interaction."

He framed it as something already reasoned through, not a request for permission.

Aestrith looked at him.

Her arms remained crossed. Her expression barely shifted, but he had been around her enough to recognize the displeasure and disapproval in her eyes.

"Reconstruction of the event that nearly killed us."

The lack of a questioning tone carried the full weight of her disbelief.

"A restrained, smaller version."

Silence followed.

Aestrith held his gaze. He held hers. She was deciding something. Or perhaps she had already decided and was allowing him to watch her displeasure anyway.

Leof followed the exchange carefully.

She understood enough to know the conversation involved her. She did not yet have enough context to grasp the conflict beneath it.

She understood the inkwell.

She understood the grinding between domains.

She did not understand the invisible conversation passing between the two adults.

"What happened at the mansion?" She tilted her head innocently.